banks and over workers and over peasants. Even before the war, not some "narrow Marxist," but Lysis himself—now basely fawning before capitalists in patriotic fashion—proved that France is in reality a financial oligarchy.

France possesses magnificent possibilities for electrification. With the victory of the proletariat in France, from electrification carried out planfully and without regard to the private property of large landowners and capitalists, the petty peasantry especially will gain enormously. With the preservation of capitalist power, it is inevitable that electrification will not be planful and swift, and insofar as it occurs at all, it will be a new bondage for the peasants, a new enslavement of peasants, plundered by the "financial oligarchy."

These are the few remarks I am able to make on the French agrarian theses, which, on the whole and in general, seem to me entirely correct.

N. Lenin 11. XII. 1921.

First printed in 1922
in the journal "Communist
International" No. 20 Signature: Russian Communist

Printed from the manuscript
282